TR FileBench — Real-world copy speeds
FileBench, which was concocted by TR's resident developer Bruno "morphine" Ferreira, runs through a series of file copy operations using Windows 7's xcopy command. Using xcopy produces nearly identical copy speeds to dragging and dropping files using the Windows GUI, so our results should be representative of typical real-world performance. We tested using the following five file sets—note the differences in average file sizes and their compressibility. We evaluated the compressibility of each file set by comparing its size before and after being run through 7-Zip's "ultra" compression scheme.

Number of files

Average file size

Total size

Compressibility

Movie

6

701MB

4.1GB

0.5%

RAW

101

23.6MB

2.32GB

3.2%

MP3

549

6.48MB

3.47GB

0.5%

TR

26,767

64.6KB

1.7GB

53%

Mozilla

22,696

39.4KB

923MB

91%

The names of most of the file sets are self-explanatory. The Mozilla set is made up of all the files necessary to compile the browser, while the TR set includes years worth of the images, HTML files, and spreadsheets behind my reviews. Those two sets contain much larger numbers of smaller files than the other three. They're also the most amenable to compression.

To get a sense of how aggressively each SSD reclaims flash pages tagged by the TRIM command, the SSDs are tested in a simulated used state after crunching IOMeter's workstation access pattern for 30 minutes. The drives are also tested in a factory fresh state, right after a secure erase, to see if there is any discrepancy between the two states. There wasn't much of one with the MX100, so we're only presenting the used-state scores.

Noticing a pattern yet? The MX100 512GB shadows its M550 competition once again. The 256GB version is slower, but it still beats the M500 240GB handily.

Interestingly, the lower-capacity drives don't suffer as much in the TR and Mozilla tests, which are loaded with smaller files and have comparatively sluggish copy speeds. The differences between them and the larger SSDs are more pronounced in the other tests, in which larger movie, image, and music files are copied at much faster rates.